Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise is support of the amendment. We just heard the eloquent plea for the arts from my distinguished colleague from my home State of Illinois. Yet it misses the point altogether. The fact of the matter is we have an arts bureaucracy in this government entity called the National Endowment for the Arts. That government bureaucracy only awards one recipient out of every four that makes an application. If we look at where those applications or those grantees are, I can understand why a colleague from the State of New York might be for preservation of the NEA in perpetuity. I can understand why somebody from California might take the same position, and I understand why somebody from Washington, DC, especially, would want to see it preserved. The fact of the matter is, I say to my colleague from Illinois, Washington, DC is, you probably do not realize this, a hub of artistic talent, and they get twice the grants that our whole State of Illinois gets. Yet they have fewer people in Washington, DC, than in your congressional district or my congressional district. In fact, Washington, DC, gets more in grants than Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined. That goes to Washington, DC. That is what goes to Washington, DC thanks to this arts bureaucracy and how they are manipulating public moneys and misallocating public moneys.”